Chapter 18 – KADE #2
I push off the doorframe and step into the room, closing the door behind me with a thud. The space suddenly feels smaller. She takes a small step back, her shoulders hitting the wall, and I see the pulse jump in her throat.
"Captivity is a strong word considering you didn't even close your door, is it?" I ask her, moving closer.
"What would you call it?" She lifts her chin higher, even as her back presses harder against the wall. "You own me for a year. You literally own me. I can't leave. Can't refuse you. That sure sounds like captivity to me."
"You agreed to the terms." I'm close enough now I can smell her perfume. Still vanilla. "You signed the contract."
"Because you left me no choice," she says with steel in those eyes that have haunted my dreams every night for four fucking years. And in all of them, she's glaring at me just like this.
Fuck, she's hot when she's pissed.
"There's always a choice, Princess." I brace one hand against the wall beside her head, crowding into her space.
"You could have walked away. Could have found someone else to do your dirty work.
I'm sure you could've found some sloppy dumbass out there who'd be willing to put in the work in hopes of getting an un-fucking-guaranteed slice of Senator Waterfuck's pie.
It would've gone tits-up, but still—no one held a gun to your head, and no one would have stopped you from walking out again. You chose to come back to us."
"No. I came to the Kings," she mutters. "I had no idea it was you."
"And whose fault is that?" My lip curls around the words. "You chose that life. Chose him over us."
She opens her mouth to speak, and my traitorous fucking soul hangs on her every word, desperate for something. A lie, an excuse, anything to explain why she left and we never heard from her again.
Why she stopped answering our calls, why she sent that fucking letter after ignoring all of ours.
She was easier to reach when we were in juvie.
Anger's safer. Anger's less likely to make me do something stupid like fall to my knees and beg her to forgive me for not hunting her down when she never came back like she promised.
But she doesn't offer anything else. No excuses. No explanations. No apologies.
Just more of the same nothing that's eaten away at me like moths all these years she's been gone.
"You think you're broken?" I lean in closer, until my mouth is almost touching her ear. "You have no idea what we became after you left. What we had to do to survive. What we turned into because the only thing that made us human abandoned us."
She's shaking now. I can feel it. But she doesn't back down, doesn't look away. "Then use me. That's what I'm here for, right? To be your toy. Your revenge."
The words are meant to wound, and they do. But then they light a fire in my blood that I've been trying to ignore since she walked into that throne room.
"Is that what you think this is?" My left hand comes up to cup her throat, feeling her pulse race beneath my scarred palm. I wonder what she thinks of that. She seems to be trying not to look at it, that's for damn sure. "Revenge?"
"Isn't it?" She's breathing hard now, her chest rising and falling. "You want to punish me for leaving."
I pause, thinking. Because the truth is too complicated. Too raw. "I want you to understand what you did to us," I growl.
"Then show me." She looks up at me, and there's something wild in her eyes. Challenge. "Go ahead, Kade. Show me. Fuck me. That's what you want, isn't it? That's why you put this collar on me."
She's daring me to be the monster she thinks I've become.
My thumb traces the line of her jaw. Her skin is so soft against mine. For years, I've dreamed of touching her like this. Years of night fantasies and waking nightmares, all centered on the girl who slipped through my fingers.
"Get on your knees," I say, my voice rough.
I expect her to at least show a hair of that defiance that made me fall in love with her.
Instead, she drops. Just like that. Sinks to her knees on the plush pink carpet of the room we built for her and looks up at me with those green eyes. Then those perfect lips part and she says the last fucking thing I expect.
"Okay."
She's on her knees in front of me, hands folded demurely in her lap, chin tilted up in defiance even as she submits. The collar catches the light, and my cock is so hard it hurts, straining against my jeans like it's trying to get to her.
This is what I wanted. What I demanded. Her on her knees, ready to pay the price for leaving us.
So why do I feel like I'm the one being fucking punished here?
"Use me," she says again, and there's something broken in her voice. "I'm here. I'm yours. Just like the contract says."
I can't tell if it's a challenge anymore or if there's actually some part of her that wants this too.
So I let myself linger in the gray for a minute. The delusion that she actually wants me, that she sees me as more than trailer trash when every bit of evidence she's given since she left—including a fucking letter signed with a lipstick print, a goodbye kiss—points exactly to the contrary.
My hands are shaking. Actually fucking shaking as I reach for my belt.
This is what I wanted. This is the plan. Take her, claim her, make her understand exactly what it means to belong to the Kings.
But as I look down at her, I can't fucking do it.
I can't take her like this. Can't let our first time be a moment born from rage and desperation and years of festering, bitter agony.
Because despite everything, despite the hate I've cultivated and the walls I've built as carefully as I've built everything else in my damn life, despite every fucking attempt to turn love and devotion into something poisonous…
I still want our first time to mean something.
And I fucking hate that.
"Get up," I growl, my voice rough.
She blinks, confusion flickering across her face. "What?"
"I said get up." I step back, putting distance between us because if I stay this close I don't know what I'll do. "This isn't... fuck. Just get up."
She rises slowly, clearly uncertain. Like she thinks I'm going to snap and do something even worse. "I don't understand."
"Neither do I." I turn away from her, running my hands through my hair. The burn scar on my arm throbs, and I press my palm against it hard enough to hurt.
"Kade…"
I say nothing. I can't look at her. Can't see whatever emotion is on her face right now.
I'm out the door before she can say more, practically running down the hallway like a fucking coward. I take the stairs two at a time, needing air, needing anything but the memory of her on her knees looking up at me with surrender in her eyes.
I spot Tank through the open gym door as I blow past it to get outside, and I catch a glimpse of him watching me, those dark eyes knowing.
Told you, his expression seems to say.
I flip him off on my way out the door.
The door slams behind me as I storm out into the dying light. My lighter's in my hand before I can think, flicking open and closed, the familiar motion grounding me even as everything else spins out of control. Ellie's not the only one who counts shit.
I wanted to break her when I saw the hope in her eyes when she met us in the throne room and thought there was a sliver of a chance we're still the same boys she threw away.
Wanted to take the nostalgia we're still clinging to like buoys in a pitch-black sea and burn it to ashes like I burn everything else. To make her feel even a fraction of the pain we've carried this whole time.
But looking at her on her knees, ready to let me take whatever I wanted just to pay a debt she owes...
That's not what I fucking want at all.
What I want is the girl who used to look at me like I was capable of anything. Who believed in us when no one else did. Who made us feel like maybe we weren't just trash destined for an early grave. Or worse, prison.
But that girl is dead.
Her eyes were dead.
And so is the boy who sold his soul to get her back.